You would have given a great deal, I dare say, to have seen all this; but there is another side to the story. Can you eat dirt? Can you eat grease in all its forms,--baked, boiled, fried, simmered? Can you bear variegated butter, variable in taste and smell? Can you get along with ham, hash, and beans for breakfast, beans, hash, and ham for dinner, and hash, ham, and beans for supper, week after week, with fat in all its forms, with cakes solid enough for grape-shot to fire at the Rebels, with blackest coffee and the nearest available cow fifty miles off?--with sour molasses, greasy griddle-cakes, with Mississippi water thick with the filth of the great valley of the West, with slime from the Cincinnati slaughter-houses, sweepings from the streets, slops from the steamboats, with all the miasma and mould of the forests? The fairest countenance soon changes to a milk and molasses color, and energy lags, and strength becomes weakness under such living. In boyhood, at the sound of a bugle, a drum, or the roar of a cannon, how leaped the blood through my veins! But it becomes an old story. I was quartered within a stone's-throw of the mortars, which fired all night long, and was not disturbed by the explosions. One becomes indifferent to everything. You get tired of watching the cannonade, and become so accustomed to the fire of the enemy, that after a while you do not heed a shot that ploughs up the dirt or strikes the water near at hand. General Pope sent word, that, if he had transports and a gunboat, he could cross to the Tennessee shore and take the batteries in the rear. The river was very high and the country overflowed. Near New Madrid there is a bayou, which is the outlet of a small lake. It was determined to cut a canal through the forest to the lake. Colonel Bissell with his regiment of engineers went to work. Four steamboats were fitted up, two barges, with cannon on board, were taken in tow, and the expedition started. They sailed over a cornfield, where the tall stalks were waving and swinging in the water, steamed over fences, and came to the woods. There were great trees, which must be cut away. The engineers rigged their saws for work under water. The path was fifty feet wide and the trees were cut off four feet below the surface. In eight days they cut their way to New Madrid, a distance of twelve miles. In one place they cut off seventy-five trees, all of which were more than two feet in diameter. While this was doing, Commodore Foote kept the Rebels awake by a regular and continuous bombardment, mainly upon the upper battery. He determined to capture it.